Kafir Stories | Page 7

and when, five years previously, she was sent to the mission, she was in a condition of absolute savagery. In the mission school her Aryan blood told; she kept easily ahead of the other girls, and took all the best prizes.
The hymn over, the girls curtsied "good-night" to the missionary and his wife, and went to the dormitory escorted by the junior teacher. This room was the very picture of neatness. The whitewashed walls were decorated with Biblical pictures and illuminated texts, and the beds, with blue counterpanes and snow-white linen, were without crease or wrinkle. On each bed, near the foot, the occupier's shawl was folded, and the manner of folding varied considerably. Small prizes were given for the best folding designs, and considerable individuality was shown in the competition. Several of the designs were marvels of ingenuity, and indicated a true artistic faculty.
In a few moments, eleven dusky heads were reposing on eleven snowy pillows.
II.
The Reverend Gottlieb Schultz was far more intellectual and cultivated than the average of his class. Sent to labour in the Lord's Vineyard in reclaiming the heathen of South Africa, immediately after his ordination as a minister of the German Evangelical Church, at the age of twenty-four, he had spent thirty-five years at his task. His wife Amalia, selected for him by the Missionary Society, was sent out under invoice five years after his arrival. She had thus been his helpmeet, and a faithful one, for thirty years. Although childless, she was of a placid and contented disposition; so much so that her smile became rather wearisome from its very continuousness.
The good old missionary had outlived many illusions, and of the few still remaining, the larger proportion related to the Fatherland he had left so long ago and which he never more would see. His passionate loyalty to the Hohenzollerns was, long after the events now recorded had happened, the cause of his removing a resplendent portrait of Bismarck from a prominent place in the dining-room; and hiding it ignominiously behind a book-shelf, where it remained until 1893, when the reconciliation between Emperor William and the ex-chancellor took place. Then the portrait was again brought forth, and hung next to that of Count Caprivi which had supplanted it.
On his top bookshelf, triumphant over a dreary jungle of theological literature, might have been found the works of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Freiligrath, and in a secret receptacle behind his little drug cabinet reposed a complete edition of Heine. He was very well read in English theological literature. He thought Luther the greatest of all theologians, but his favourite reading was Tauler. He had an emotional understanding of, and sympathy with, the "Friends of God."
And what illusions had he not outlived! Had he not seen the natives, for whose benefit his blameless and strenuous life had been ungrudgingly spent, sinking lower and lower, exchanging the virtues of barbarism for the vices of civilisation? Had he not seen the chosen lambs of his flock sink back into the savagery that surrounded them, lured by those tribal rites which bear a fundamental resemblance to the ritual of the worship of the Cyprian Venus? Had he not seen the land covered with plague-spots in the shape of canteens from which poisonous liquor was set flowing far and wide, ruining the natives, body and soul? All this and more he had seen; all this and more he had prayed and struggled against through the weary years. He still prayed, but he had almost ceased from struggling.
One illusion he still retained. This was the firm belief that the average barbarian was fully the equal of the average civilised man--an illusion so common amongst the missionary fraternity early in this century, that this equality was almost, if not quite, a fundamental axiom in all missionary reasoning. In Mr. Schultz's case, this illusion had paled from time to time in the face of striking experiences, but it was too deeply ingrained in his character ever to disappear. Experience after experience faded out of his memory, but the fundamental axiom remained. These experiences he, so to say, preached away, for whenever he found the fundamental axiom waxing dim, he polished it up with a liberal administration of theological logic, abstruse reasoning, and illustrations from standard authorities.
Samuel Gozani, the probationer, was in several respects a remarkable character. Son of a native headman of the Gealeka tribe, which considers itself as forming, as it were, the Kafir aristocracy; he had, fourteen years previously, been placed at the mission school. For six years he was as backward in acquirement as he was unsatisfactory and troublesome in conduct. But a change came. A native revivalist visited the mission, and, behold--a shaking! Amongst the dry bones that moved, none showed so much energy as Samuel. His whole life changed,